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Remembering the violent legacy of BLM-Antifa and how to move forward

Today is the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. His death launched months of deadly far-left rioting and looting across the United States from Black Lives Matter-Antifa. Building from years of networking, radical leftist extremists saw an opportunity for a violent leftist revolution. They nearly succeeded in some places, like Portland, Ore., where I’m originally from.

A year before Floyd died, I stood outside the Multnomah County Justice Center in downtown Portland. It was a warm afternoon in June 2019, and with a GoPro and iPhone X in hand, I was recording yet another leftist protest in a city that had grown used to extreme political violence since the surprise 2016 election of Donald Trump.

This particular demonstration had been organized by Popular Mobilization, a side project of the violent criminal organization, Rose City Antifa. Their stated purpose was to express “solidarity” with fellow socialist and anarchist comrades — and to counter a Proud Boys flag-waving event occurring elsewhere in the city.

The crowd, numbering in the thousands, illegally occupied the streets and intimidated the public. It was a disruption tacitly tolerated by local Democrat officials and law enforcement.

I moved quickly toward the front, hoping to capture a wide-angle shot of the banners and signs. But before I could frame the image, I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head from someone who charged at me. The force knocked me forward several steps. Disoriented and confused, I was suddenly encircled by masked, black-clad figures. Punches and kicks rained down on me from every direction.

The attack changed the course of my life. Blood poured from my ear and face as I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. I had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage — a life-threatening brain bleed. I was lucky to survive. The months that followed were spent receiving treatment at Oregon Health & Science University, dealing with the consequences of a traumatic brain injury.

That beating effectively ended my ability to continue the on-the-ground video reporting I was known for. “Let the videos speak for themselves,” was my belief. But it turned out that Antifa viewed my work — particularly the documentation of their violence — as a direct threat.

“Your camera is a weapon,” I remember reading them say. The images I captured showed their brutal violence and organized criminality, contradicting the lies that they were merely “racial justice” activists.

Because I had survived, their death threats escalated. Masked Antifa members came to my parents’ home, attempting to force their way inside through the front door. Police were notified, but nothing happened after their investigation. For my safety, I was forced to say goodbye to my family and plan an escape from the U.S. My departure from my country had ironic, vague parallels to my parents’ escape from Vietnam in 1979.

I turned to writing — a skill I had long struggled with but now saw as the only viable path forward. In 2021, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy was published. To my surprise, the book became a New York Times bestseller. As someone who had been dismissed and blacklisted as some “right-wing agitator” by liberal journalists, I managed to ultimately crack some of the liberal media lies that far-left violent extremism didn’t exist.

After half a year abroad, I thought I could return home. It proved to be a near-fatal mistake. Wrongly believing the violence had abated, I was met instead with a violent hatred by Antifa that had been fomenting for years. Antifa militants chased me through the streets of downtown in May 2021. I was tackled and choked, escaping only by managing to stagger into a hotel lobby and pleading for help while bleeding from my legs.

In the years since, I’ve expanded my reporting to other beats while continuing to track the violent fringes of the far-left.

The death threats have never stopped, however.

But I also found myself increasingly bogged down by the administrative burdens of managing multiple accounts and juggling platforms to share my reporting. I thought the more places I shared my work on, the more people I could reach. But it was simply wearing me down and taking my time away from what I do best: investigating and reporting.

That’s why I launched Ngo Comment on Substack. I created it to bring together a body of work that had become scattered across platforms. It is now the central hub for my reporting — blog posts, dispatches from the field, original video footage and images.

It is a space where my independent journalism can exist outside the filters of institutional gatekeeping, but still bound by the highest ethical standards and accuracy you know I am committed to. Subscribing to Ngo Comment helps support not only my work, but the security measures required to do it safely.

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I never set out to become a public figure or target. I just wanted to document the truth. My documentation of the 2020–21 riots after George Floyd died shows how important independent voices and cameras are in reporting the truth. Good journalism often comes with a cost. Ngo Comment is an answer to that challenge.